Peter Knäbel is no longer a member of the FC Schalke 04 board with immediate effect. His contract has been terminated. He will remain as a consultant until the end of the year.

FC Schalke 04 will enter 2024 without a sporting director. As the club announced on New Year’s Day, the contract with Peter Knäbel has been terminated with immediate effect. The 57-year-old will also be removed from the board. However, Knäbel will remain a consultant for the club until June 30, 2024.

“Together with our new CEO Matthias Tillmann and Christina Rühl-Hamers, we have made the decision to restructure soccer at Schalke without the position of Chief Sports Officer,” said Schalke’s Supervisory Board Chairman Axel Hefer on Monday. For this reason, Knäbel’s contract as sports director was terminated at the turn of the year – by mutual agreement. “We are very grateful to Peter for his work and his tireless commitment to Schalke 04. He played a major role in stabilizing the club after relegation in 2021, in a very difficult sporting and financial situation,” said Hefer.

Knäbel initially joined FC Schalke 04 as Technical Director in April 2018 and was initially responsible for the further development of the Knappenschmiede. He was then appointed to the Executive Board in March 2021. In mid-November, he announced that he would not extend his expiring contract. However, it was considered unlikely that Schalke would have offered him a new contract anyway. So now the even earlier end – although Knäbel will continue to work as a consultant until the summer.

As a consultant, however, Knäbel will continue to drive forward “some forward-looking projects in the areas of digitalization and sports science”, as he said himself. He thanked the club, where he worked for a good six years. Knäbel will return to his family in Switzerland in the summer.

Schalke: Knäbel one of the movers and shakers of the 2022 resurgence

Knäbel took over Schalke during the most difficult phase in the club’s recent history in March 2021, when the first relegation was almost a certainty. “He played a major role in ensuring that the club was able to survive relegation in 2021 in sporting and financial terms,” said Supervisory Board Chairman Axel Hefer back in November.

That is also what will be associated with Knäbel for decades to come. In the hour of relegation, he put together the squad that returned to the Bundesliga as second division champions in May 2022, despite major financial worries, together with sports director Rouven Schröder, who he had hired. These were the greatest moments of his tenure